Lair of the Evildoer

I’ve always wondered about the evolution of becoming an evil criminal mastermind. In order to be profitable, you need to start early in life. Get encouragement from your evil parents (it helps if they have evil names like Adolf or Ethel), go to an evil college (I’m thinking Dartmouth), get an evil degree (something like Marine Biology), set up shop in an evil city (anyplace in Florida will do), hire evil henchmen (usually found on Craigslist), come up with an evil scheme (phone hacking seems in these days), get an evil lair (and the prices on those are simply outrageous these days)…

Fuck, if it was me I would barely have enough motivation left after all that to be mischievous, let alone evil.

So I can sympathize with the villain from Lair of the Evildoer. He goes through all the trouble of becoming evil, getting a lair, and coming up with a scheme and I foiled the whole thing in about three hours. And to rub salt the wounds, I had a great time doing it.

Lair of the Evildoer is a top-down shooter where you play as some kind of mutant egg-man thingy out to exterminate all the zombies created in this evil office building, complete with evil wood paneling and blue shag carpet. There’s twenty randomly-generated levels full of assorted baddies. There’s a mind-blowing twenty-five weapons that can be picked up along the way, with each weapon type having variable stats similar to Diablo or Borderlands.

You move with the left stick and aim with the right one, a set up that works fairly well. I did die several times while playing Evildoer, which my boyfriend felt might have had something to do with choosing the wrong experience upgrades. Early on I poured all my level-up points into dexterity, which increases your aiming accuracy. Once I had a 100% rating in that, I spent most of my points on health upgrading. Then came the enemies who could only be killed using melee attacks. With practically no points spent on that, fights with them resembled something out of a MMORPG , with each of us taking turns to thwap each-other until one of us wasn’t thwaping anymore. But even when I started to accumulate points in melee strength the battles still dragged like a dog with worms and it constantly broke up the flow of the game. This is one of my only design complaints.

The graphics are of the “looks like it was done on MS Paint” variety. Clearly in the top-tier of such games, but they have that look none the less. The sound effects are a bit lacking as well, but the music is cool and trippy. The whole experience reminded me of Zombies Ate My Neighbors, which was a childhood favorite of mine. Some people had the raw nerve to call Dead Rising the spiritual modern equivalent to ZAMN. Such people are mentally ill. Lair of the Evildoer is as close to Zombies Ate My Neighbors as any game in the last decade has come, and it’s nearly as good. It’s incredibly imaginative, humorous, and well designed. And, without wishing to spoil anything, the final boss fight will go down in the annals of gaming as one of the most epic this side of Ocarina of Time. Make sure you have a bathroom break beforehand.

As for me, being a true top-of-the-heap evildoer is too much work. I’ll just do my part by continuing to invest in Google.

Alright, finished the game. Was really a breeze and not very challenging. And about that “epic” boss fight going down into the annals of history etc. etc. Well, I don’t want to spoil anything either but let’s say that it made me laugh hard. And I mean that in a good sense. ;)